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Monday, 3 November 2014

Elbrus - Skidoos look like fun

A summiteer had arrived at the Barrels a
day or two before our planned ascent. He looked swashbucklingly heroically
sun-burnt, windswept and knackered. For a moment I had a teenage yearning to be
just like him. Weather-beaten, craggy and above all heroically successful –
rakishly paying off the skidoo pilot (driver/cowboy whatever you call him) with
a flourish of rubles. The mid afternoon sunlight glinted in his reflective
sunglasses . . . . and he looked like twelve feet tall.

Two days later after a bone shattering
journey on a stinking piece of two-stroke machinery that keeps cutting out and
that takes all my fading strength to keep seated as it hurls over seeming
limitless precipices of piste I arrive at the Barrels; beanie askew and in a
state of mind numbed exhaustion. As we near the Barrels compound the skidoo
pilot yet again re-starts the stalled infernal petrol leaking machine to
negotiate the dip down and back up to the Barrels camp.

Photo courtesy of Moegammad Hendricks

I stumble into our barrel and re-emerge
with a fist full of rubles of the agreed amount which I proceed to politely (I
thought) count out in front of my erstwhile and unsmiling skidoo driver (cowboy
or pilot) - who snatches the notes from me with what I can only assume is an
exclamation in Russian along the lines of “only a dick-head would accept
payment without doing the counting himself”.